


Banish All the World

by QDS



Category: Shakespeare - The Henry Plays
Genre: M/M, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2006, recipient:RubyNye
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-25
Updated: 2006-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-17 09:39:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/175464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QDS/pseuds/QDS





	Banish All the World

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rubynye](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rubynye/gifts).



The night's rain left the English camp muddy and a dull cold hanging in the air. Teeth chattered around fires, and men lay close under blankets, seeking warmth and reassurance that tonight might not be their last one on God's earth.

Harry, King Henry, the Fifth Henry after his father the Fourth, dragged his feet back to his tent, boots heavy and thick with sucking mud. The men, the soldiers, were not only cold, but some were sick, and there were grumblings and fears of what lay ahead of them. No talk of deserting, but Harry knew that this night and the morrow would be a test of his strength and their loyalty.

Harry threw the flap of his tent aside and he shucked off the cloak. Tomorrow they would face the French, and the sounds coming from their camp were...distracting. Raucous, jovial, confident. Harry hoped dearly that these sounds had more than a touch of cocky bravura in them, and that itself might at least give his sick and tired men something of an edge in the morrow.

But at this moment, they sat chilly, and they waited.

Doubt was not a sensation familiar to Harry. Though, as he sat down, looking into one of the torches, flames sparking and alive, he figured if doubt never crept in, his fate would have been very much like Hotspur's. The headstrong Henry Percy had taught him much about honour...and determined foolishness. Until now, Harry had felt vindicated and ordained inspired in committing to this war against France. But now...

It was not so much the rightfulness of his venture the plagued his thoughts, but what it had cost him.

One of the two guards who sat outside his tent coughed. They were dutiful but clearly wishing for warmth. Harry had half a mind to ask them inside to share in the fire, but for the moment, Harry waited.

There had meant to be another man in here with him. Another who, like the soldiers outside, Harry could have lain with for comfort and warmth. Since Harry declared his intentions for France, he had spoken with this man about it; that they would share the same tent, keep each others counsel...and hold each other furtively, kiss secretly and somehow (oh, they had grown so clever at that!) make love with most of their clothes on.

Harry remembered the hidden acts of desire in the coldest parts of the castle. The chillier places were the least likely to have traffic, for they could not afford detection. Harry's already worried father would have despaired utterly; not only was his son playing a braggart and a drunkard, but he also committed unnatural acts before the eyes of god.

What followed, then, Harry supposed, was just punishment for his transgression.

Betrayal of king and country cut Harry, offending his higher feelings of honour most deeply; Cambridge and Gray's treason had sent him almost blind with rage. But that this should come from one with whom he had shared whispers, and tears of frustration, and moans as they pressed their bodies tightly together, hands clutching each others most delicate and sensitive parts.

Scroop had known that the sentence was just. His preparedness to die had struck Harry all the more. And made him wonder if all that had transpired between them had been but a lie.

And now Lord Henry Scroop was dead. Harry's hand had signed the paper allowing it.

A cold wind flapped at the tent's entrance, and the breeze caught Harry. He shuddered, but made no move to go to bed yet. He thought that perhaps if he had the body of Jack Falstaff that the layers of debauchery and good times would be a more effective cloak from the cold.

Harry closed his eyes at that memory. The last words he had spoken to Jack...the rejection of his old life to be born anew, to become a pious Christian king fit to rule England. His own father, who he had once disdained for the jocular company of Jack, had touched him with his pleas. He had once thought himself so different to his father, that he had sought out the company of the rougher sorts. For a time, such men had been a welcome sight.

Ultimately, though, Harry was his father's son, more cunning and clever than most first thought, and knew how to win people over, including Harry himself. He'd wept over his father's corpse, but on hearing the news of Jack Falstaff's death, a quiet word that had crept to him not long after he'd, with only the barest of hesitation, ordered Bardolph hanged...no tears fell.

But a hard lump in his chest had formed, and Harry wondered if Jack had felt the same lump as Harry had effectively banished him from his sight. Or maybe the words had sunk in like a chill, a cold to infect Jack's lungs.

Jack...sweet Jack. Harry recalled the warm beer and laughter in their throats, the loud songs of women and lust. And he recalled Jack's affection for him, the embraces that he could fall into and feel as if the muddled thoughts in his head would all be put to right by the hulking bear of a man.

Harry could pretend otherwise, that Jack was going to die soon anyway. An old, sick, fool of a man...but ultimately, Harry had uttered the final blow.

He had watched the life bleed from Hotspur, his own hand having drive the blade into the knight's body. At Harfleur, Harry had cut down many men with his sword. Blood had spurted onto his face and coated his armour, mingling with the mud to make a dull, thick red. Those deaths were a blur in his mind. Those deaths he had seen with his very eyes, and had raised the final blow.

Harry had chosen kingship over following the chimes at midnight, and now his future decisions had to follow that through. He may not have been present for the deaths of Scroop and Jack, but more keenly than Hotspur, or the fallen men at Harfleur, did he know that he had killed those he had loved in order to become the king he was today.

The squelch of soldier's boots in the mud outside his tent distracted Harry, and he remembered the guards, cold and wet. He called them in, and they entered and sat on the chairs, gratitude and respect in their smiles. Their presence and demeanour was an assurance to Harry that he had made the right decision for England and for its people.

Harry knew, though, that while the battle tomorrow might vindicate those choices for his country, Scroop and Falstaff's deaths had killed parts of himself that would never return again.

 _"Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world!"_

Jack Falstaff's words echoed in his mind, and the Harry knew then that the man had been more prophetic than he could have ever expected.

  



End file.
